D-Link RangeBooster N650 WiFi Router

This is an IEEE 802.11n (draft) compliant wireless router that gives excellent throughputs and provides good security features for both small offices and homes

Thursday, August 09, 2007

The RangeBooster N650 is an IEEE 802.11n (draft) compliant wireless router that's meant for small offices and homes. Along with this router, we also received a PCI as well as PC-card adapter. Interestingly, the PCI card also had 3 antennae, something that's uncommon among client cards. The wireless router itself has four LAN ports as well as a USB port. It is fairly simple to setup and configure, even for a novice.

There were two interesting features that we found and tested in this router. First, was QoS capability, which is primarily aimed at prioritizing game traffic. You can play network games over the router's WiFi and even prioritize their traffic. The router supports all the key ports used by popular games and is very easy to configure. You can also define your own ports in case there's a game that doesn't work on any of the default ports.

The router also has a built-in firewall, DHCP server, DMZ support and virtual server. We configured a server on the server's DMZ port and tried to access it over the Internet. The whole setup was very easy and worked like a charm. In addition to this, the router also has a policy wizard that lets you define who can access what and when. Interestingly, this router has done away with WEP and only supports WPA and WPA 2 for security.

We tested this router for throughput, file copying and streaming. It was put on an isolated network with a machine connected to its LAN port. This machine was then accessed wirelessly using the two wireless cards that we received with the router.

We used NetIQ QCheck for the tests. The router gave a throughput of 76 Mbps. It was also able to stream data at 50 kbps and 100 kbps without any data loss. Plus, it only took 30 seconds to copy a 50 MB file from the wireless client to the PC, which is pretty fast. Compared to the Buffalo Nfiniti wireless router we reviewed sometime back, this router gave better results in all the tests.

Interestingly, the wireless PCI card for the RangeBooster N 650 router ships with three antennae

Bottom line: Considering the features and performance, the router is a good buy.

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